Call Me Barry Allen

Or Wally West if you prefer.

I’ve just come home from the gym where I ran today.  I was hoping to run the race course by work again but after a beautiful day yesterday, the weather today was a disaster!

Sleet coming down nearly horizontal due to the wind drove me inside onto the treadmill.  And while the treadmill is monotonous I figure it is good for training my body to run at a given pace.  And that pace is like greased lightning going down hill with the wind at my back.  Ha!

Seriously though I am getting faster each passing day and I am anxious to have a morning where I can run the 5k by my house without having to play hockey later that day or less than twelve hours after having just played hockey.

Today’s 5k time was 21:10, twenty seconds faster than the last time I ran on the treadmill and inching ever closer to a twenty minute 5k run.  If I can keep up this pace of shaving 20-30 seconds off my time each week it might even be before the month is over that I can make this happen!

The Flash would be proud.

Spring Is Coming

At least it seems to be in our area as the last two days have seen the mercury climb to over 10C each of the last two days.  It has really going my thinking about what my weekend fitness is going to become.  Hockey only last for another few weeks for me and so my attention will turn fully to the races I have for the summer and getting ready for them.

If you have been following along you know that I am trying to be faster, and progress is being made to that effect but I think what is really going to help me gauge the progress on this front is consistent running times and conditions.  Last summer and fall I did most of my running on Saturday mornings before I did anything and I think that’s the way to go again this year.

I am really enjoying my new programs at the gym too.  It seems odd that I would be since I am nearly dying when I do them, but I think that is what I like.  By the time I have done my 105th squat I’m finished, or doing the 8 minute set of four exercise challenges it takes a huge will to keep on pushing, to increase the amount of things I can get done in the time span.  One of the other trainers at the gym saw me Tuesday and gave that knowing kind of look and smile as I rolled my eyes and grunted doing whichever exercise I was doing.  “Gotta love those plyos’ she said.  “Yeah”, I said between breaths.  With the kind of tone that meant ‘Yeah I’d love these if my muscles were not screaming at me to stop!’.

This bit of interaction got me thinking about gym buddies that both Amber and Marion have talked about in each of their blogs.  I do not think I really have any, especially once I actually get doing my thing.  The old really fast walking guy that Amber talks about does say hi to me any time that I see him, and the one lady at the desk who’s name I can never remember is nice to me, and Jodi and I get along well and prod at one another now and then.  Usually it is me trying to sneak up and tap her on the shoulder and get away before she knows it was me.  But that’s about it.  I don’t go out of my way to talk to people, and pretty much just stick to myself.  I’d be happy to go with people I know to the gym, but if I am at the gym on my own I pretty much just want to get there and do my thing and get out.

SSX

The other day I posted on my Facebook that I was picking up this game and it was making me feel about ten years younger.  This is because back when I shared an apartment with a few of my college friends. Ian who actually did not live with us at the time bought a Gamecube and it stayed in residence at the apartment.  We had two games, Super Smash Bros Melee and SSX Tricky.

These two game took up pretty much every free second of our time and it was glorious!  Today due to the focus here we will stick to SSX (though volumes could be written about the Smash Bros events in that apartment).  We typically played Tricky (we used to just cut off the SSX part, so much so that I just call the game Tricky even now when I got the new one) when there was only two or three of us around and we would just take turns doing the runs and trying to out score each other on the trick runs.

It was awesome.  The new SSX game does not lend itself as easily to that method of play since you don’t simply put in your name at the end of each high scoring run, but in a wider scope it is pretty great in that all of the friends you have on the Xbox are perpetually competing with you for those high scores and fast runs.  Not only is there the satisfaction of beating and competing with your Xbox friends, but the entire online community can enter events where you all compete to win in-game credits that you then spend to enter other events.  It is great because I like winning things even if they are intangible in-game things. (Usually I place in the Gold bracket, which is ‘Above Average’  Diamond and Platinum elude me most of the time still.

Another thing I have liked about SSX since the SSX3 version is that EA puts some great music into the game and it is nice to have my music library expanded while I play.  For instance this current game has introduced me to Foster the People.

And The Naked and Famous

It is also nice that Amber has tried to play the game a few times.  Most of the time I get games and she just has no interest and I can understand why, like Batman for instance, it is just not her type of game.  This game however is one that it would be great if she could get good enough to be competitive at it with me.  That might be a bit of an unlikely wish since I have been playing some version of SSX for ten years and she has just started, but it would be cool.

Almost There

I just have to stay on target.

I have my new program at the gym and despite not feeling the greatest I have gone anyways, because sometimes it is a bit of a compulsion for me to go regardless of how I feel.  If I’m going to be sick anyways, I might as well keep on doing the things I like so that I can enjoy myself a little bit and when I am better I can crush whatever number I put up during my sick time – win/win really.

I’m not feeling that sick at the moment, just a little bit of a blech in my chest, but nothing too bad and yesterday I went to the gym to run.  I was going to run the race course again outside of work between my work time and our staff meeting but we had a bit of snow here and a few people were sick so the staff meeting got cancelled until next week.

As you might recall I am trying to get my 5K running time down to 20 minutes or less. and while originally my stated fitness gaol was to have my time under 23 minutes I have already totally destroyed that.  Last night at the gym I was on the treadmill again and just set the pace a little bit higher again. 8.7mph for most of the run, then upped it during the last couple of laps.

This resulted in a 5K time of 21:30!  On the same machine that my previous record of 22:10 was set.  Forty seconds faster is a lot and I am really thinking that the twenty minute goal is within my grasp long before the July date of the Warrior Dash.  Hopefully I can get this time to be under 21 minutes in time for the 5K KMs for Care charity run that I am doing (donate above!) I think that would be really quite amazing. Especially when I consider that in mid December when I picked running back up I was doing the 5K in over 25 minutes!

Progress, I love it!